Virus Scan, Spyware and Adware Scans to help keep your computer free of problems.

Viruses (including trojans), spyware and adware are the number one problem facing internet users today.

It is important to have a virus scan program running as a TSR or running in the background on your computer. Virus Scan programs include:

	AVG - Our favorite antivirus program. Here is a link to the free program
	Avast - Avast Antivirus
	McAfee - Mcafee antivirus
	Norton AntiVirus 2009 - Norton or Symantec Antivirus
	Trend Micro - Trend Micro Antivirus
	Kaspersky - Kaspersky antivirus
	Panda - Panda antivirus
	Clam - Clam antivirus

It is also important to have a spyware and adware scan in place to run on a regular basis. The one we frequently use is Spybot Search and Destroy.

If you download Spybot Search and Destroy and AVG onto your computer and run the installation programs, you should be in pretty good shape. Keeping them updated and running manual scans with Spybot will remove any unwanted programs which have been pushed onto your computer by unscrupulous webmasters looking to make a buck.

It is not only important to run these scans and keep them up to date, but you should be careful what sites you frequent. There are many sites out there that let you play cards or other games online, but while you are playing the games, they are collecting information from your computer using cookie exchange, online forms, spyware and adware programs and some even resort to putting small virus programs on your computer to collect information. Remember, nothing on the internet is free (very few exceptions) and you would be better off buying and playing a retail game from the store, than to play the so called free games on the internet.

Email is another way to collect spyware, adware and viruses. Recently we have been seeing a lot of computers which have a program installed on them by many names including: Antivirus 2008 or 2009, XP Antivirus, Antivirus Pro or Antivirus Pro 2009, Windows Security Suite or another one called Spyware Bot. These programs load themselves with a free scan for viruses and are almost impossible to remove unless it is done professionally. Avoid them if at all possible and whatever you do, don't buy the software they are selling. It is full of false positives (viruses detected which are not viruses at all or are harmless) and anything they do to your computer will generally set it up for further infection.

Email lists are sold all over the internet! Spider programs (which are what the search engines use to collect data about your website) are also modified and used to collect data from websites including email addresses. If you have a website and have your email address posted on it, it is a good idea to hide your email address by making it a .gif image or by encoding it so that it will not easily be read by these programs.

Once you receive email from spammers, it is important to put the spam in your deleted items folder and let it go. Don't try to remove yourself from their email lists by sending them an email back.. What you will most likely do is put yourself from the "suspected or unconfirmed email address list" to the "confirmed (this person is opening our email and reading it) list"

Any time you have a question about anything, please call our office! Our technicians will be happy to give you advice over the phone!